György Spiró - Captivity

Uri commented that this was also the case in Judaea. Tija stopped short but then picked up: Flaccus had quickly seen through the game, having quite probably been briefed beforehand in Rome. He cut the number of days of leave that could be granted, and ordered that any weapons in civilian hands be collected, with all articles brought to the harbor to be cataloged and stored in a special warehouse. The investigation went on for more than six months, with many houses searched and several hundred civilians, a dozen soldiers, three book-keepers, and two centurions executed, and ultimately order was restored.

As far as the judges were concerned, it is no surprise that they would favor whoever paid most. In principle, the prefect was the chief justice of the whole of Egypt, exercising the emperor’s personal judicial right on his behalf, but before Flaccus came along those functions were not discharged, whether out of laziness or corruption. As soon as he was appointed, Flaccus went around all the koinons , paying particular attention to the judges’ guild. He summoned all the judges from all over Egypt and announced that any of them caught engaging in bribery would be executed. The judges ardently nodded their approval, then returned home and had a good laugh. Flaccus followed up by having a few judges of them crucified at random (though not, of course, without any grounds), and the others soon knuckled under. During the first two years of his prefecture, Flaccus made a habit of dropping in unannounced on judicial proceedings and sitting through them to the end without uttering a word. That was enough to set the judges quaking, and they did so to the present day. He achieved all that in Alexandria even without having next to him the ten legal advisers whom Rome usually sends to assist every prefect!

“But that doesn’t stop a court recorder from falsifying a judges verdict,” said Uri.

“Certainly, Lampo and a few other characters do that,” Tija acknowledged, “but the judges are still scared. You can’t set up a little Flaccus everywhere; you are never going to have total legal security in Egypt, but then that is also true of Rome when the emperor sticks a paw in… In my view Egypt has never had a prefect who was as well suited for the job as him, nor will there ever be another. Regardless of that, of course, the emperor can replace Flaccus whenever he chooses by hanging some charge of high treason around his neck that even you wouldn’t dream up in your worst nightmare. I can quite understand Flaccus having sleepless nights: he dare not sleep for fear of being plagued by such nightmares.”

Uri mused. Flaccus was a friend and schoolmate of Augustus’s grandsons. Tiberius had begun his own reign by having Augustus’s last surviving grandson, Postumus, murdered. Our Aulus cannot ever have considered himself safe. There was no way of knowing how he had done it, but he had wormed his way into Tiberius’s graces, even his most intimate circle, which is how he happened to have been there on Capri when the last prefect died, to be nominated by the emperor as Hiberus’s successor. Flaccus was no fool.

In the middle of May they learned that Antonia had died on the first day of the month.

She had survived Tiberius by six weeks.

Antonia did not kill herself, it was said; her vital force had simply given out and she followed Tiberius into death, as surely as if she had been his wife. Antonia’s birthday, January 31, had been a holiday throughout the empire, including Alexandria, with the Greeks offering sacrifices, and now the day on which she died was proclaimed an official day of mourning. Both had been made state holidays: her birthday would still be celebrated next year, and on May 1 shops and markets across the empire would be closed to commemorate her, though in her life no statue had ever been erected to her, few even knew her, as for nineteen years she had remained in the background, spinning a web of Roman and Egyptian political threads (she may well have had a role in Sejanus’s fall) like a melancholy, wise Fate. Unquestionably, it was fitting to mourn the present emperor’s grandmother across the empire.

The death affected the alabarch’s family profoundly.

“An era has passed,” said the alabarch gloomily. “An era has passed with her death.”

Philo said nothing; Tija just shook his head; Marcus, as usual, held his peace. The death was a big blow for the alabarch personally; Antonia’s properties in Egypt would revert to the emperor, who was his grandmother’s heir personally as well as by virtue of being the Princeps, so that a large chunk of his income, coming as it did from management of the estates, would be lost.

Uri slowly began to catch on: Philo and the others suspected that Antonia might not have simply have died of grief or out of duty in the wake of Tiberius’s passing; there had to have been some other factor. Antonia had never been ill a single day, or at least no news of that kind had ever been received via the regular weekly courier service by which Alabarch Alexander had maintained with Antonia. Messengers sped regularly to and fro between Roman senators and wealthy Greeks, the Greek students at the Gymnasium had told him, carrying all manner of nostrums. Not that the old decoctions had been forgotten — authors of popular books of medicine everywhere made sure of that — but whenever, say, an ointment of some kind to banish all boils would become all the rage in Rome, or some herbal remedy that cured all internal maladies would become all the rage in Alexandria, or laserpitium would become all the rage someplace else, it would make its way, inevitably, across the empire.

Antonia’s couriers had never been known to carry medicines.

Antonia was not yet seventy, and as Celsus had recorded, people who had reached that age could still have long lives ahead of them. A person of sixty might easily live into their eighties or nineties because that was the kind of stuff they were made of. Had Antonia perchance quarreled with her grandson? Or had Caligula held her responsible for being instrumental in the murder of her own son — his father? Or had she perhaps killed herself after all?

Flaccus, it was reported, had gone into a depression, neglecting his duties, seeing nobody for days on end; even his morning salutations had been canceled.

Previously, Greek and Jewish adherents had hurried over to Flaccus’s place in large numbers every morning, and the prefect had invariably received them freshly bathed, in a freshly laundered toga, physically and psychologically fit, mentally prepared. Flaccus would begin attending to business early in the morning, almost at daybreak, involving participants at the salutation to a considerable extent, and he would finish with them by noon, his guests eating their fill, cramming their sportulas full as in Rome, and going back home contentedly for an afternoon snooze. Flaccus, on the other hand, would retire for a mere hour before spending the afternoon driving around the city or galloping off to a parade of the troops in Nicopolis, thirty miles to the east of the city wall, where one of the two legions, the XXII Deotariana, his favorite, was stationed (the other, the III Cyrenaica, was encamped at Marea to the west, south of the lake and some eight miles from the city walls so that soldiers rousting about on leave should not threaten Alexandria’s peace too greatly). Nicopolis had been built as a picturesque harbor; Uri had once spent two days there drinking with one of his Greek friends, Timothy, a native. It was at Nicopolis that Augustus had defeated Mark Antony’s troops, with Cleopatra being captured and Mark Antony committing suicide — Timothy had pointed out the house. Augustus had founded the town as a memorial to that victory at Actium, as the name indicates, strewing temples all over it, that of Apollos being particularly splendid, with sacred games held there every four years, entrance and food being free and sleeping outdoors a possibility; the event was due to be held that very summer.